What is a live dashboard?
A live dashboard displays metrics and data visualizations in real-time. This enables teams and decision makers to react to changes in status and performance as quickly as possible.
Live KPI dashboards are particularly useful in situations where important metrics are otherwise difficult to access, or when the team’s attention is focused on more immediate tasks. For example, many call centers display live dashboards on a TV on the wall. This allows the team to immediately see when something has changed (such as a build up of callers) and respond. Without a live dashboard, it would be impractical to access this information.
A live dashboard can surface metrics from multiple data sources, and display them side by side. This presents the opportunity to visualize only the most important metrics, necessary for managing a specific system or process.
Because live dashboards are usually used to support a specific task or process, the design of the dashboard is especially important. Unlike an interactive dashboard (which is impractical to work with when focused on other tasks), a live dashboard needs to be able to be understood quickly and at-a-glance.